If you’re considering learning a new skill for either business or personal use then finding a good online education platform is a good place to start your search. There are many perks to seeking online education, such as setting your own schedule and goals, and saving money on commuting to class, which make online education an attractive option to more and more people these days.
This is why Udemy is so popular. But is Udemy the best online education platform? Is it worth the money? In this Udemy review, we’ll tell you everything you need to know about Udemy.
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Last Updated: Sep 21, 2023
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Udemy has one of the largest selections of online learning courses on the internet, with over 183,000 courses. There are both paid courses and free courses, which we’ll go over in this Udemy review. And the free course selection isn’t lacking, with hundreds of free courses to choose from.
Courses include both videos and written articles or coursework reading assignments. Each course must have a minimum of 30 minutes of video footage, but many courses go beyond that requirement. Some courses even come with a certificate of completion, which can look good on job applications.
While you’re reading this Udemy review, you’re probably wondering whether Udemy will be a good fit for you and your lifestyle. So in this portion of our Udemy review we’ll break down the type of people who will benefit the most from Udemy’s services.
Udemy offers so many different courses that it’s almost impossible for you not to find one that you’re interested in. In fact, it’s pretty likely that you’ll find several.
And they cover both personal interests, hobbies and self-improvement as well as business courses, which means you’ll find courses ranging from happiness and aligning your chakras to courses about technology, leadership and management skills to advance your career.
It doesn’t matter how much you know about a particular topic, either. They have both beginner and advanced courses, so you’re sure to find one that matches your expertise level. The fact that you aren’t limited to courses because of your experience level makes Udemy an attractive option for many people looking to learn something new.
After compiling the information for this Udemy review, here is a list of people we think would benefit the most from Udemy’s services:
For businesses, Udemy offers Udemy for Business (which is a name that could probably use some work). This allows businesses to give their employees access to courses that will let them brush up on their skills or learn new ones. With Udemy for business you get access to over 6,000 courses across multiple categories.
You have the option to use the Enterprise plan for 21 or more users, the Team plan which is designed for between 5 and 20 users, and Leadership Development Programs of which they offer both open and private programs. With the Enterprise and Team options you’re given a custom URL and access to 24/7 support.
You also get a free trial or demo with each of these plans so you can try it before you buy it, which is a nice feature. But because this isn’t a Udemy review specifically about Udemy for business, we won’t get much into that. If you’d like to read more about Udemy for business you can check it out here.
This may be one of the most important sections of this Udemy review for most people. Of course price is one of the most important factors when you’re considering a new product or service. So, just how much does Udemy cost?
Udemy’s cost varies from course to course. Because you don’t pay a subscription fee for Udemy’s services, you’re paying for each course unless you choose the free courses. You only have to pay for a course once, however.
So even if the course takes you a number of months to complete due to your own time constraints you won’t be charged for it on a recurring monthly basis, which is one of the perks to this pricing system. Plus you get lifetime access to the course once you’ve paid for it, so if it’s updated later or you feel like you need to re-take the course at a later date, you can.
Many courses are free, but paid courses range from $11.99- $199.99. The harder the course or the more information that’s provided in the course, the more expensive it is. But if a course seems to have a price that doesn’t make sense to you, it’s probably worth noting that Udemy doesn’t actually set the price of the courses but lets the instructors do so instead. Bigger, more well-known instructors can charge more for their courses.
You’ll notice that a lot of courses are heavily discounted. You’ll see many instances of courses which were originally nearly $200 costing only $11-$13. And that discount isn’t always for a limited time. Courses are discounted sometimes more than 90% year-round.
Why would they do this and aren’t they losing money? In short, no they’re not. They’re more concerned with the number of students signing up for the services, so they make money getting more people signing up for the inexpensive courses than they do with the few people signing up for the more expensive courses.
Many people reading this Udemy review are probably wondering if they can purchase a course for someone else. It’s pretty easy to look through their thousands of courses and think of someone who would like one.
Luckily, you have the option to gift courses. You pay for the course, and then it’s sent to the recipient’s email. You can leave a message to them along with the gifted course, and decide the date that it’s sent to the recipient, which is a nice touch.
It wouldn’t be a proper Udemy review if we didn’t tell you about Udemy’s return policies. Of course there’s the possibility that you won’t be satisfied with a course or its instructor. If you find yourself in this situation, Udemy allows for refunds within the 30 days of purchasing the course. They typically send the refund to your original payment method and it usually takes between 5-10 days to arrive in your account.
In the spirit of providing you with a comprehensive Udemy review, we’ll take you through the steps involved in creating a Udemy account. Fortunately, it’s quite easy to create a Udemy account, and you can complete the process in mere minutes.
Here are the steps to create a Udemy account:
Considering the complexity of some of the courses, it’s nice that the sign up process for Udemy’s services is so simple.
As part of this Udemy review we looked up Udemy’s most popular courses in all 13 course categories so you wouldn’t have to.
Here is a breakdown of our Udemy review ratings system for Udemy courses:
1st Tier: 4.7 stars and up
2nd Tier: 4.6 stars
3rd Tier: 4.5 stars
4th Tier: Less than 4.5 stars
This course is designed to teach the popular programming language, Python. So far 800,00 people have purchased and enrolled in this course.
The course itself consists of 185 lectures as well as 24 hours of video. It has a 4.5/5 star rating and more than 450,000 reviews, meaning that hundreds of thousands of people have taken and enjoyed this course, which is why it was important to add to this Udemy review.
Just as the name of this course suggests, you can learn all of the business fundamentals from this course.
Over 400,000 people have purchased this course and it has a 4.4/5 star rating, so thousands of people thought it was worth the money and well worth mentioning in a Udemy review. You’ll get access to 8 hours of video, 31 downloadable resources and 33 articles when you enroll in this course.
This course will provide you with all of the skills and expertise needed to pursue a Finance career. You’ll get 18 hours of video, 11 articles and a whopping 491 downloadable resources with this course. It’s got a 4.6/5 star rating, which puts it in the second-most highly rated courses tier of this Udemy review.
AWS stands for Amazon Web Services, and this course is for people with little to no experience with AWS. It comes with 18 hours of video, 2 practice tests and 17 downloadable resources. It’s in the third tier of our Udemy review ratings system with a 4.5/5 star rating.
This course provides you with a variety of Microsoft Excel skills ranging from beginner to advanced. You’ll get 18 hours of video as well as 37 downloadable resources when you sign up for this course. And it’s in the second tier of our Udemy review with a 4.6/5 star rating.
This course will teach you all of the secrets needed to help you learn to read faster and develop better memory retention skills. There are only 5 hours of video and 5 articles with this course, but it comes with a rating of 4.5/5 stars, which puts it in the third review tier of our Udemy review.
As you can likely infer from the name of this course, it’s an art course that will hone your drawing skills. There are 11 hours of video, 5 articles and 4 downloadable resources included with this course. It’s in the second rating tier of our Udemy review too, with a 4.6/5 star rating.
This is a great course for business owners to take before their launch, as well as anyone who wants increased traffic to their website. There are 22 1/2 hours of video, 38 articles and 10 downloadable resources included. And it fits in the third tier of our Udemy review system with a 4.5/5 star rating.
This course will teach you the art of Reiki or help you develop your skills. It’s in the top tier of our Udemy review rating system with a 4.7/5 star rating. You’ll get 5 hours of video, 7 articles and 39 downloadable resources with this course.
This is a good course for photographers with advanced skill levels to master their craft. It falls in the first tier of our Udemy review rating system with a 4.7/5 star rating from students. And you’ll be provided with 23.5 hours of video, 63 articles and 31 downloadable resources with this course.
This course is great for anyone who wants to teach other people more about how to improve their mental health. This course fits into the second tier of our Udemy review rating system with a 4.6/5 star rating. You’ll get 31.5 hours of video, 9 articles and an ample selection of 168 downloadable resources with this course.
This course will teach you to play the piano and keyboard with only 20 minutes of practice a day, and results in weeks. It’s in the top tier of our Udemy review rating system with a 4.7/5 star rating from students.
This course will help you prepare for the IELTS exam and help you achieve a Band 7+. It has a 4.4/5 star average rating, which places it in the fourth tier of our Udemy review ratings system. The course comes with 80.5 hours of video, 10 articles and 157 downloadable resources.
Instructors on Udemy aren’t vetted in the same way that professors at a University are. Anyone can become a Udemy instructor, even you, and even without formal training. So if you’re really knowledgeable about a subject and want to teach others about it, you can sign up to be an instructor.
Because this is a Udemy review and not just a review for students, we’ll walk you through the free Udemy instructor sign up process.
Of course you can find tons of courses on Udemy, but part of a good Udemy review is teaching you how to find the best Udemy course for you. Here are some tips for finding the ideal Udemy course for you:
Udemy comes complete with a pretty robust filter system which you can customize to meet your course needs. You can choose from a particular course category, the rating of the course, how long the videos in the course are, the experience level needed to complete the course, price, language and more. These filters make it easier for you to find a course that’s more suited for your needs.
Each course will provide you with a descriptive overview, which will let you find out no only what you can learn from each course, but also the duration of lectures and videos. This will help you find out what the course offers you and how you can fit it into your schedule.
One of the things that makes writing a Udemy review easier also makes finding a good course easier. Each course comes complete with a ratings system and a review section. So if you’ve been considering a course and find it to have consistently low ratings and horrible reviews, maybe it’s time to consider a different course.
You can find the instructor bio along with the course information, which is an often overlooked feature that we wanted to include in our Udemy review. Their bio includes information about their experience, feedback from other students who used their courses in the form of ratings and reviews, a total of the students they’ve taught on Udemy, the number of courses they currently have on Udemy and a self-written description about the instructor.
This will let you know more about the person teaching the course. Some instructors are even quite open about letting students know they can contact them on social media to ask questions about the course any time.
Good instructors regularly update their courses, so this wouldn’t be a good Udemy review if we didn’t teach you this crucial bit of information. You’ll want to check to see when the instructor last updated their course. Frequent updates indicate an instructor who is passionate about their course work, while someone who has never updated probably never will.
Unclear language and information can discourage many users, so we wanted to cover the course preview feature as part of this Udemy review
Each course on Udemy provides you with a course preview. This preview allows you to view an overview of the entire course. Or, at least it should. You can get a good idea what to expect from the course from the course overview. If the course overview isn’t comprehensive or easily understood, the course may not be either.
While writing this Udemy review, we discovered that many times you can find a course at a discounted price. Because of this, you’ll likely be able to find a course that fits your budget, even if you can’t afford the most expensive courses.
Our Udemy review wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t include a list of all of the positive aspects of the site. Here are some of Udemy’s best features:
No matter your price range, you’ll be able to find a course or two that fit your budget.
If your budget is tight, there are over 600 free courses on Udemy that you can benefit from.
No matter which course you choose, you have the option to get a refund within 30 days of enrollment if you’re unsatisfied with it.
Once you’ve purchased access to a course, you can go back and check the updated course work for life.
Udemy offers over 183,000 courses in 13 different categories, with several sub-categories. There’s no shortage of courses. You’ll likely have more trouble choosing just one than you will finding one you like.
When you pay for a course, you are awarded a Certificate of Completion upon completion of the course. This is only offered with paid courses, not free courses. And while the Certificates of Completion are not accredited, they do still look good on some job applications.
If we’re going to write an un-biased Udemy review, we have to tell you about the things we don’t love as well. Here are some of the things Udemy could improve:
All course content on Udemy is created by instructors, not by Udemy. And because Udemy allows anyone to become an instructor, this can be both a good and bad thing. While allowing anyone to become an instructor allows for course variety, it also sometimes produces some course content of questionable quality.
Each Udemy course is put through what Udemy calls a quality control process. However, considering the quality of some courses and the number of courses available on Udemy, we’re not sure how accurate this process is.
If you’re looking for an online learning platform that provides you with official certification when you complete your courses, you need to keep looking. Udemy will provide you with a Certificate of Completion IF you’ve chosen a paid course, but the certificate isn’t accredited. This means that some jobs won’t accept it, and most universities won’t either.
Udemy seems to offer a lot when it comes to online learning, but there are many other services that offer similar features and it wouldn’t be a good Udemy review if we didn’t look at other options. If Udemy doesn’t seem worthwhile to you or you’re just interested in seeing what their competitors have to offer, then let’s take a look.
The first of Udemy’s competitors that this Udemy review will be looking at is Coursera. Many of Coursera’s options are available at no cost and they work with many universities and major companies to deliver certifications and courses that allow users to enter a wide variety of career fields.
Universities like Yale, Northwestern, and the University of London are all involved with many of the options offered by Coursera, so you can expect to find more accredited courses and programs available. Coursera even offers programs to obtain online degrees.
Of course, with these options comes the matter of cost. While many of Coursera’s available courses have a free option, in order to get the certificates or participate in a degree program you’ll be required to pay. Some courses can become very expensive compared to Udemy, but ultimately these courses are still cheaper than attending a physical university.
EdX is another Udemy alternative worth discussing in this Udemy review. EdX offers over 3,000 university-level course options and was established in 2012 by Harvard University and MIT. Since it was founded, over 20 million students have taken courses through edX.
Like Udemy and Coursera, edX’s free options don’t grant you a certificate upon completion, but edX also offers several Master’s degree programs that are fully accredited.
EdX courses are also typically recognized and well-received by most employers, due largely to the reputation of edX’s course providers and partners. And although edX does allow you to take many courses for free, you’ll need to pay additional fees if you want those certificates to show to your potential employers.
LinkedIn Learning was another option we had to consider as part of this Udemy review.
This Udemy alternative is nice if you already have a LinkedIn account, because the interface is similar. Although it requires a subscription of $29.99 per month, LinkedIn Learning does offer a free trial program so you can see what course options are available before committing to that fee.
LinkedIn Learning offers over 10,000 expert-led courses and offers personalized recommendations based on your profile and other courses you’ve taken.
Linked Learning’s downside is that it offers so many course options that it can be overwhelming. With over 10,000 course options to choose from, it can be hard to find the right program for you.
LinkedIn Learning’s course material is also ungraded, meaning you won’t get any kind of grades or credentials, like transferable credits, upon completion of any courses. Considering that you don’t get anything tangible for your subscription, this is a serious flaw.
If you’re reading this Udemy review because you’re looking to learn some more creative skills, then consider checking out Skillshare. Skillshare provides an intuitive and user-friendly learning experience and offers a fantastic amount of community interaction with other course students.
Some of Skillshares options are even workshops that focus on community interaction like this. Skillshare also has some fantastic accessiblity options for their lecture videos, such as closed-captions and adjustable playback speed.
Where Skillshare falls short is in their instructor interaction. Many of Skillshare’s users find it difficult to get feedback from their instructors, or even maintain communication with them in general. Skillshare’s courses also lack depth, and getting a deeper understanding of many of the course materials can be difficult.
There are a lot of online educational options available today. With so many choices it can be hard to know which ones are worth dealing with and which are overpriced or even scams. But any online platform with the goal of providing affordable education is worth checking out, and Udemy is no exception.
Udemy offers its courses without requiring a monthly subscription, which is a definite plus for some. Courses can cost anywhere from $0-$300 to take a course, but this is always a one-time fee for the course itself, not a monthly or annual subscription.
While none of Udemy’s courses will give you any sort of credit, the platform is still a wonderfully accessible way to learn a skill or hobby and may help even help further your career or business. With a multitude of options available, Udemy is a great place to begin any form of online learning.
With its user-friendly design, affordability, subscription-free pricing, and course diversity, Udemy is a fantastic service and definitely worth using if you want to learn a new skill. We hope you found this Udemy review helpful and wish you luck with your educational journey!
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